Interface Usability
by Merien Q. Kunst

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Menu Look and Feel: Is this a Button?

To hang a painting you need a hammer and a nail (and a wall), to water the plants you need a hose. How about this one: to find a phone number, you need to start reading each page in the phone book from page 1, until you reach the page where the wanted name is listed. No? To view your favorite TV show, you zap to the right channel, watch 30 seconds of a creepily familiar introduction video clip, and then the show starts. If you change the channel, but then come back again, you get to watch the introduction all over again… Does that sound right? When you take the elevator, you just press any of the new symbols that are displayed on a huge array of buttons, and see what each one does. You keep pressing them, one by one, until you reach the right floor. Oh, and the buttons look like chewing gum stuck to the wall. In fact, some of the buttons aren’t even buttons: that is gooey chewing gum that you just stuck your finger in! Getting annoyed yet? Well, you’re not alone.

Usability is all about offering people something they are looking for. That means offering it quickly, correctly, and with maximum accessibility. On a Website, accessibility depends on factors like loading times, user requirements and navigation. Navigation breaks down into buttons, structure, and guidance. Flash offers wonderful tools to create menus, navigation tricks, and really exotic buttons. Everybody that is starting to work with Flash will be thinking about things like an interactive phone for a menu, or a tree, a remote control, body parts, cubes, balls, subway maps, giant fruit baskets, planetary models - but remember, no matter how cute or cool or ingenious your interface might seem to you, it doesn’t work if it doesn’t work.

Not Many People Think, "Gray, Square Buttons…"

Yet, the gray, square buttons are what people know and understand, just like blue, underlined text. Not very exciting, so we’ll need to work out how to merge our galaxy model (or fruit basket) with the users’ idea of a menu, and motivate them to navigate through the Website with it. A solution might be to reconsider your ideas and shape them into a more recognizable menu scheme, making your menu items look a bit more like classic buttons and placing them on the top, side, or bottom of the screen. A less drastic solution might be to have people test your interface. This way, you could see how (or if) they figure out that those thingies are functional buttons, and then make design improvements based on that information.

A menu design can often be improved by adding pointers, like small pop-ups with your buttons, or a help function that delivers a quick explanation. You should expect that Website visitors aren’t very patient, so make sure that a minimal effort is required to use your brilliant interface.

Finally, you won’t really be testing your navigation with people if you help them, as this will make this a useless test - unless, of course, you also have an ingenious plan to be there to help everyone that visits your site. If you want to design usable Websites, you must be hard on yourself - because your visitors will certainly be unforgiving of your self-indulgent design lapses.